The Best American Sports Writing 2007

by Maraniss, David

• ISBN13: 9780618751150
• ISBN10: 0618751157
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-10
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this absorbing collection, featuring twenty-eight of the finest pieces from the past year, has something for everyone. Guest editor David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has assembled a fresh crop of the people and stories that dominated the sports world in 2006. Michael Lewis gives a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary football coach Bill Parcells. Bob Hohler delves in the murky waters of modern amateur basketball, where teams blatantly dole out cash to players and shoe companies set their sights on prospects as young as twelve. William Rhoden traces the fate of an unknown filly injured on the racetrack. Jeff MacGregor describes the unforgettable Friars Club roast of boxing's provocative promoter Don King. Daniel Coyle follows a forty-year-old Slovene soldier who might be the world's best ultra-endurance athlete. L. Jon Wertheim tells of a young pro-basketball player who found himself wrestling the shoe bomber Richard Reid to the ground during a transatlantic flight. And Derek Zumsteg provides a hilarious and utterly original in-depth account of the baseball career of Bugs Bunny, "the greatest banned player ever." These pieces and many more go beyond the spotlight, revealing the people and issues that make sports so relevant and important to all of us.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xi
Introduction	p. xvii
The White Coon	p. 1
from Field & Stream
Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever	p. 7
from USS Mariner.com
Ready for Some Fútbol?	p. 22
from Texas Monthly
The Game of the Year	p. 28
from Sports Illustrated
Filling in the Pieces of Jake Scott	p. 42
from The South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Fading Away	p. 54
from ESPN.com
Deal of the Century	p. 63
from The (Torrance, California) Daily Breeze
An Unknown Filly Dies, and the Crowd Just Shrugs	p. 81
from The New York Times
Let Us Now Raze Famous Men	p. 84
from Sports Illustrated
Only Medal for Bode Is Fool's Gold	p. 104
from The Washington Post
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger	p. 107
from The New York Times Play Magazine
Polite When in Neutral	p. 120
from The New York Times Play Magazine
Snook	p. 131
from The New Yorker
Blank Monday	p. 144
from The New Yorker
What Keeps Bill Parcells Awake at Night	p. 159
from The New York Times Play Magazine
The Madness of John Chaney	p. 181
from Philadelphia Magazine
The Real Deal in So Many Ways	p. 192
from The Washington Post
$neaker War	p. 196
from The Boston Globe
Baseball for Life	p. 225
from The New York Times Play Magazine
A New Game Plan	p. 240
from The Washington Post Magazine
The Saturday Game	p. 261
from ESPN.com
Playing 4 Keeps	p. 282
from Chicago Magazine
The Ultimate Assist	p. 293
from SI.com
In Iraq, Soccer Field Is No Longer a Refuge	p. 304
from The Los Angeles Times
A Moment of Silence	p. 309
from Runner's World
Team Hoyt Starts Again	p. 322
from Runner's World
The Big Show by Little People	p. 337
from The Los Angeles Times Magazine
Talking Turkey	p. 346
from The New Yorker
Contributors'
Notes	p. 359
Notable Sports Writing of 2006	p. 365
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction One of the joys of visiting my parents at their apartment in Milwaukee during the final years of their lives was rummaging through the wide-ranging collection of magazines and newspapers that piled up on their couch and spilled over to the floor below. The Nation and the Packer Report. The New Yorker and The Sporting News. The New York Review of Books and ESPN The Magazine. The Progressive and Packer Plus. The American Prospect and Baseball America. The Capital Times and Sports Illustrated. The Washington Post National Weekly Edition and Baseball Weekly. If you wanted to know about my dad, Elliott Maraniss, his reading tastes told much of the story. A lifelong newspaperman, he was always interested in history and politics. The books he checked out from the local library and stacked near the magazine pile tended to be about European writers, Civil War generals, American presidents, British diplomats. But what satisfied him as much or more, I think, was reading about a rookie defensive tackle showing promise in training camp with the Green Bay Packers or another phenom left fielder out in El Paso (when the Diablos were in the Brewers farm system) who was knocking the stuffing off the ball. Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, was known, among his other greater accomplishments, for saying that when he got the newspaper in the morning he turned to the sports section before the front page. I'm not sure whether sports came first with my dad, but he certainly turned to it most often. He was not a statistics guy. He had little interest in the Sabermetrics approach to baseball analysis in which everything is reduced to numbers. He loved baseball more as a story with characters and some drama. It didn't have to be elegiac, or melodramatic, or even particularly elegant. Maybe that's because he spent his adolescence in Coney Island rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers when they were the "Lovable Bums." His baseball was the sort described by Mark Harris in Bang the Drum Slowly and The Southpaw. Just saltof- the-earth kids, some dumb, some smart, making their way through the vagaries of baseball life. He was from the Ring Lardner school. I had a tendency to make things up when I was a kid and had an excuse for every wrong thing I did. My dad called me Alibi Ike long before I realized that he was at once chewing me out and letting me know that he loved me. In my family, where my mother and siblings were scholars, "The sun got in my eyes" held as much literary merit as any quotation from Shakespeare. I was a bit surprised when my dad joined my brother as owner of a team in the baseball rotisserie league formed by a bunch of my friends at the Washington Post in 1984. The Washington Ghost League, as we called it, was one of the early leagues formed after the statistical game was invented a few years earlier by some writers and editors in New York. As I said, Elliott was not interested in statistics, so why would he take part in a game of statistics? Because it really wasn't about the numbers back then before the entire sporting nation got caught up in what later became fantasy baseball, and fantasy football, and fantasy basketball, and even fantasy NASCAR. It was about the yearly drafts held at Tom Lippman's house on McKinley Street and the little dramas and characters of our league. How Lippman and his Tom-Toms had an obsession with catchers. How Ben Weiser of the Weiser Owls could almost persuade you that giving up Roger Clemens for Pete Ladd was a good deal. How Neil Henry, in his love for all things Mariner, could not discern the talent gap between Mickey Brantley and Ken Griffey Jr. How Bill Hamilton's team was lousy every year e